A Blue Tide At Midterm
Another day, another onslaught. The gloss is moving, but few are listening. Another day of poll results spelled out and summarized on the front page. Another day of small shifts in polling numbers on pollster.com. Another day of Nate Silver handicapping races and talk shows and news programs interviewing "experts" -- all of whom are vying to be vindicated in the narrative they are pushing.
A smaller number of us than in the 2008 election are even paying attention, according to the media. Even the worst case in this election may not be catastrophic. We could take this one off and no harm done.
So why make an effort to vote at all? It's just a midterm.
Right?
The term karmageddon was coined by Tulip in a comment to my diaries Countdown To No Confidence, dicussed more fully here.
The dynamic system of American politics ebbs and flows in an amazing cycle. Every four years the Presidential election brings out the most voters. In between, every two years, the midterm elections brings out the "base" while lots of voters stay home. Scattered throughout are special elections for various local issues requiring voter approval, local offices which run on their own cycles and runoffs and various other "adjustment" elections following on from major ones.
This tapestry of elections is hard to see, as a whole. It is harder to know exactly what is on the ballot. We Americans like the fact we can vote or not vote and no one will be the wiser. We take this convenience for granted. That attitude could be taken as a sign that everything is OK in America. That attitude could be a sign everything is so screwed up that voting is an exercise in futility. It could be a sign that we just don't care who is in what office because real life is happening and that political stuff is just fluff.
Innovations
Midterm elections often set the tone and innovate changes. Just yesterday a judge in Alaska allowed voters to see a list of write-in candidates so they can spell the name Murkowski right when they are in the booth. If it stands, that's quite an innovation.
Whole political subsystems have evolved to fill the niche of midterm elections. They are national enough in impact and local enough in turnout to allow specific issues better play. Midterms have been masterfully used by the Rovian Machine to push back gay rights and tilt turnout toward social conservatives, thus incrementally pack state houses and legislatures.
Every ten years, the election of state officials can shape how congressional districts are drawn up. Every twenty years, that critical and cyclic innovation falls on a midterm election. This midterm election happens to be one of those. Like a comet which returns once in twenty years, there are political machines set up to influence local races.
This midterm that man-made cycle is upon us again.
Much of this dynamic is hidden from citizens who do not seek it out. The midterm machines are counting on that. California's Proposition 23 is designed for the midterm. Corporations and coalitions seek out the midterms in order to push through changes they know wouldn't fly in a Presidential elections.
This year the innovation made possible by the Citizen's United decision unleashed hundreds of new organizations, many of them coordinated to create a machine outside the reach of official political parties and under the radar for most Americans. The last stretch of elections has gone into a gloss of infosmog since 1980. Is that gloss a deeper shade of grey this time? Who knows?
Pollsters are clawing for position among the chattering class. We have an excellent stable of poll analysts here at DailyKos. Many of us come here each day to see what the polls are doing and be guided to detailed crosstabs and issue and race-specific diaries. We have evolved into the Netroots through the actions of millions of people. We are feared as a political force to be opposed. We are praised for bringing clout to issues which have languished during the Imperial Reign Of Reagan's Raiders.
My tea party friends have coalesced on a mythology to explain the fear they feel after the last two major elections. This last cycle of the American political system has hit them hard. The whole mythos of the Reagan Revolution is collapsing into the political soil after thirty years of hegemony. Those who felt comfortable within that ediface are unable to articulate exactly why they are scared now, but scared they are.
Netroots Rising
We are noticing the poor and disadvantaged. We have lifted up our grievances and found communities of people who share them. We have fought over meta and bannings and what kind of content should be allowed and not allowed. The work to find a balance, especially during the surge in interest around elections, is a constant battle within our community.
Our largest fight, one we enjoin upon the shoulders of previous grassroots movements, is to make sure every citizen can vote, and do so with the least impediment possible.
Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
Mark Twain
Winning The Gaggle War
Definition of GAGGLE
- flock; especially : a flock of geese when not in flight — compare skein
- a group, aggregation, or cluster lacking organization (a gaggle of reporters and photographers)
- an indefinite number (participated in a gaggle of petty crimes)
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Midterm elections are contests among political gaggles of people and interests. Each gaggle could be a one-time thing. Some voters summon the energy to vote in a midterm for a single issue. Some voters are influenced by several gaggles. At the national level of our politics, the media are gaggles pursuing various narratives and staking their reputation on "having the narrative right" for the outcomes of the election on Tuesday.
To win this election, at the crass national gaggle level, we need to hold a majority in both houses of Congress. To tie, we need to hold the Senate. To triumph we need to hold both houses and achieve a working filibuster-proof majority so the logjam of bills in the Senate can be released in the lame duck session about to commense.
To lose this battle, we would have to lose the majority in both chambers. That's the gaggle war among pundits and pollsters. But the Netroots gaggle of sites and bloggers and readers has deeper objectives. We seek to speed the collapse of the Reagan Revolution so a new political paradigm can rise, fed by the energy that collapse unleashes.
We seek karmageddon. It's time to end the Reagan Revolution for this generation. Been there. Done that. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't fun.
Thanks for all the fish.
Bring It On
Karmageddon comes not as a single political victory, but as an inexorable shift in the Overton windows toward a new philosophy of government. As I have discussed extensively in other diaries, the crystallization of defeated conservatives after Goldwater lost in 1964 around the Powell Memo in 1971 is our opponent. That political philosophy has run its course. Its time is over. The Netroots is gathering strength from the people waking up from a long sleep induced by the "benevolent dictator" era Reagan symbolized, and still evokes nostalgia in the hearts of the tea partiers and Republican party organs alike.
But it is nostalgia. Those days are gone. The tea party dead-enders are just the last ones to hang on to the fantasy that they are still with us. We have shrunk government, and now it's to the point where it hurts. It hurts the poor. It hurts the rich. It hurts all of us equally. That pitiful equalness is not the American Dream. It is the low ebb of an exhausted tide.
Each election now is bringing on karmageddon. The "innovations" that were the Reagan Revolution have nearly bankrupted us, personally and nationally. The prison population has soared from 200,000 in 1980 to 2,000,000 today. Our nation has locked up one in ten adults, a higher per-capita incarceration rate than South Africa during the peak of apartheid. Millions of Americans have been wiped out economically -- those who believed in the Masters Of Opportunity the most.
Bury the dead and tend to the living. The slovenly worship of Opportunity has unleashed legions of megachurches preaching the Gospel Of Prosperity; forcing more of us to depend on 401Ks instead of pensions has made us hungry for high Wall Street returns; dissing the poor and disadvantaged as lazy whiners has evolved into including most of us who aren't rich.
We The People are just such a hassle.
But we're a hassle still because only we can vote. The Masters Of Opportunity need us at least to behave as they expect us to and everything will be fine -- for them. Forget all that equality stuff. Equal treatment is just too expensive. Equal employment is not market-based. Equal justice is an extravagance we cannot afford. Meeting the equal danger of climate change would plunge us into a spiral of declining profits. All those sensible, and long overdue, changes in our nation a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system or feed-in tariffs or other measures would divert our attention and resources away from Pax Americana. An Empire can't worry about such things.
This pettiness has reached its limits. Our roads are falling apart because Reagan's Raiders stopped funding maintenance. Our national security depends now on a whole gaggle of "private contractors" because doing it with Federal workers would just increase union jobs and make what "needs to be done" too expensive and subject to public oversight.
Is it really my government's business the choices a woman makes about her own body? Whether any two citizens are in love and want to be married, and have that marriage recognized? Whether anyone finds relief from using marijuana as medicine?
I don't care. I don't care to know. I definitely don't want the Masters Of Opportunity to be able to know. We've seen what they are capable of. They've turned our prisons into business opportunities. They've turned our media into a pale joke beside the international press. We're tired of wasting our time on sucking up to 2% of the population. We have lives to live. We have roads to rebuild and high-speed rails to build. We a future and they don't.
This midterm is historic in many ways. Most of all, we have the chance to make karmageddon come quick and clean and get on with the future. If we can't hold the line against the backlash of racism and fear and jingoism, we let the supporters of Opportunity drag out the inevitable.
Cast them into disarray so deep they must change. Attack them with random acts of citizenship. Swarm the polls once again and finish this round, for all our sakes.
The sun has set on Morning In America. Get over it.
It's Equality, Stupid!
The Morning In America rot has spread throughout our common framework, physically and spiritually. Our common civic religion is based on equality. By excluding the poor and illiterate and felons and students who move around a lot and... and.... A whole political submachine within the Reagan Revolution has been devoted to excluding anyone they can. A wierd part of the whole Southern Strategy has been to do everything possible to suppress the vote. This gambit has been a Republican Party standard since 1964. It sucked a lot of voters out of the Democratic column and into the Republican column. And the Democratic Party has evolved to a much better place because of it.
It is that Democratic Party which the Netroots now seeks to improve and expand. The Southern Strategy has run its course. The Republicans are sinking in the mire of their own mud-slinging creation. Now fully in the quicksand except for their lips, they desperately spout, "But taxes are too high!".
In this midterm, we have opportunities to shift our nation toward a future in which opportunity is liberated from inequality. Hundreds of them. In variations has diverse as the electorate now is. Issues local and large. When some citizens can swallow up 99% of all opportunities, the rest will not be able to cozen it long. We've sucked it up for them for thirty years.
That's long enough. Gather up your gaggles. Get them to the polls. It's time to hold the line and bring the dawn of the 21st century in America. It's overdue. The long, dark night of the last Administration is nearly over. The Masters Of Opportunity have fought us as we pry the Reagan Revolution's cold, dead fingers off our throats. But it is dead. The Reagan Revolution will not come again.
It's our time now. Make it quick and merciful. Do your duty. Vote.
GOTV
The series so far:
T - 10: The Prisoner's Dilemma
T - 9: I Voted Today
God Bless The Skeptics - A Musing
T - 7: Money Can't Buy You Love
T - 5: Listening